Benjamin Button

Last night I saw Benjamin Button. Emma warned me against it last week, but Nathan, Danielle, and Justin still wanted to see it, so I disregarded her warning (for the sake of complacency).

It wasn’t as God-awful as she made it out to be, but I had some issues with it as well. For one, I don’t like movies that use an elderly or deceased person’s diary as a vehicle for the story. Getting into a movie’s premise via narrated flashbacks is a filmmaker’s shortcut--a cheap way of making unconnected fragments fit together without any creativity. The movie attempted to make this new by having it serve as a sort of revelation to the daughter about her real father, but that just made me cringe--especially in light of how unresolved that portion of the movie was.

To the extent that I could overlook that pet peeve, it struck me in a weird way. I enjoyed it, but never got emotional over it. I thought Brad Pitt was really good- interesting premise (interesting is one of those words that carries no weight of its own, but I’ll use it here anyways), but when you think about it the movie sort of lacked emotional depth. I didn’t like Daisy’s character at all--she was kind of a bitch--and I didn’t buy that they ever really loved each other.

I was most interested with the aging and anti-aging effects they used and how well they worked. There was one line about never being able to get back lost time that resonated with me, which I hated myself for, as it is perhaps the most widely dispersed and trite snippet of wisdom.

There are so many movies out, or coming out that I want to see. The Wrestler and Gran Torino both look awesome.